Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday August 02, 2009 @12:17PM
from the information-wants-to-be-free-but-it's-gotta-work-for-it dept.

jon jonson writes "Information from the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing has been leaked to WikiLeaks, revealing billions in insider loans, and the bank has been working day and night to censor the information contained in the document. Last night at 6:55pm GMT, they served an injunction against the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, five minutes before the 7pm news was due to be aired. The TV station just displayed the WikiLeaks URL instead. They've also injuncted Iceland's national radio, banning all discussion about the contents of the document, and they are actively trying to censor the rest of the Icelandic media along with WikiLeaks."

Kaupthing had fallen over and if they hadn't tried to stop people finding out, it wouldn't have been posted to Slashdot and I and many others would never have known. We need a name for when attempted censorship leads to wider distribution of the information. The Kaupthing effect, perhaps?

There is also (usually) a correlation between their enthusiasm for suppressing the information and the need for it to be revealed in public interest.

I'm acutally amazed that good PR companies aren't already exploiting this for purposes of advertising. The fact that this correlation still holds means that no one's gaming it yet. Get on the ball Google - I want to bid on "Streisand Effect Keywords"!

Like most wikileaks documents, I've found it nearly impossible to verify the high level claim (insider trading) off the information provided. They always seem to drop the ball on writing down their analysis...or letting others (otherwise, it's NOT a wiki!). I expect several pages of summary and analysis, but instead, just broad claims with little or no references or supporting facts.

For those of us who aren't experts in Icelandic corporations and banking, here's a sample, after some googling- one of the listed parties is a Robert Tchenguiz [icelandweatherreport.com].

If the claims in that blog posting are true, 500BN of Iceland's citizens' money flew out the door in "loans" to tax haven countries.

The document is fascinating, and quite easy to read. I had to go to page 18 to find the first mention of an exposure that wasn't looking like an insider trade (ie: lending money to people that owned the bank).

If it was a bunch of lies, then the bank officials would have pointed that out.

And when a guy stands in the driveway of a GM plant screaming that alien technology is being used to make Corvettes, does that mean it's true because GM refuses to answer questions from him or reporters and then kicks him off the property? Of course not.

First off, I didn't say the claims were lies. I said there was no explanation or analysis, and thus no way for me to verify them. There isn't even any explanation as to why they believe the documents are authentic. I was lamenting, in general, at the lack of explanations and analysis of documents posted to Wikileaks as a whole. Putting down a list of companies and calling it "analysis" isn't.

Second, it does not logically follow that if someone doesn't deny something, it is true- in part or whole. 5th Amendment, anyone? Same goes for trying to get something out of the public spotlight. Maybe the whole reason they want to suppress it is because it IS bullshit, and letting it spread would make it difficult or impossible to find impartial jurors in a criminal or civil trial- or harm existing companies that have done legitimate business with them.

Lastly, very often a public relations effort involves not even acknowledging claims, regardless of their merit. There are a variety of reasons why. For example: sometimes the claims are bullshit but you don't feel you can convince the public otherwise. Sometimes you want to keep a low profile and hope people will get bored and move on to shinier news items. Sometimes you cannot say anything because of pending legal action- either because it would be risky to comment, or you've been told not to.

But hey, feel free to play out the simple Hollywood conspiracy movie plot. The world is rarely that simple.

And when a guy stands in the driveway of a GM plant screaming that alien technology is being used to make Corvettes, does that mean it's true because GM refuses to answer questions from him or reporters and then kicks him off the property? Of course not.

But they also don't take him to court and file a gag order against him or issue takedowns. Furthermore, if the guy is on public property and not interfering, they can't really do anything. (Right to free assembly.)

But they also don't take him to court and file a gag order against him or issue takedowns.

Posting a document marked "private and confidential", which were protected by confidentiality agreements signed by the employees who leaked them (or were obtained by breaking into computer systems or bypassing security systems), believe it or not, is not legally defensible. It may be morally correct or even honorable in your eyes (and possibly in mine, I'm on the fence), but one man's morals do not make another man'

This is the exact reason why whistleblower laws exist: to prevent people from being sued for exposing ethics violations.

You can say that again, whistleblower laws are there for a reason but there must also be due process. The allegation in this case is that the owners of Kaupthing bank effectively loaned them selves and connected parties, specifically the owners of a local company named Exista, ISK 500.000.000.000 which at the time would have been the equivalent of about c.a $6 billion. This money was loaned to shell companies in Holland and the tax haven of Tortola, allegedly in order to pump up the share prices of Kaupthin

Like most wikileaks documents, I've found it nearly impossible to verify the high level claim (insider trading) off the information provided.

Could you at least read the article summary?

Insider trading is completely different from insider loans (which is what was in the summary).

Insider trading is when people with secret information about a company trade in its stock without filing the required disclosure forms. It's to protect investors so that all investors (in theory) have access to the same information t

However 500BN of assets is not proportional to the size of the Icelandic real economy - it is not plausible that the citizens could have lost such amount.

The blog posting contains numbers on the order of 300 billion, not 500 billion -- and those are Icelandic crowns (ISK), not euros or dollars. That puts the total at about 2.3 billion U.S. dollars.

Given that Iceland's population is only about 320 thousand people that's still a pretty massive hit to their economy (call it 7000 USD per capita), but not totally implausible (particularly for a heavily leveraged state-controlled bank).

Kaupthing wasn't state-controlled at the time these transfers were made. And the figures are genuine. In 2004, I remember reading Kaupthing owned assets worth 4300 billion ISK (about 60 billion USD at the exchange rate then).

This is the stuff that we should be angry about. Not putting some trailer-trash families in rehabilitation programs discussed about in the recent front page article (That's the one with the hyperbole about 24hr surveillance BTW).

And you're a dimwit waving the "boo-hoo, the nanny-state is comming" banner.

This is the problem in modern politics; people like you who like to cheer for this team, or that ideology. If only it was that simple.

The struggle to keep individual rights begins with information and transparency in actions which affect all of us. Iceland's economy was largely kept afloat because of the tremendous (and maybe illegal) risks that their banks took.

Now that this has been exposed, shouldn't this be a problem that we sho

We (in the USA) still have no idea where our
TARP [wikipedia.org] funds went. And no documentation likely to appear on Wikileaks either. When our gov't asked the banks what they did with the money we gave them, they just replied, "We'd rather not say".

The banks unable to pay back (...the TARP funds...) end up being owned by the feds anyway, and then the books are wide open.

Perhaps you're thinking about some other country? The US government is anything but transparent, notwithstanding any "Hope & Change" rhetoric to the contrary. It took an FOIA request and months to even be allowed to see the Air Force One Manhattan fly-over photos that everyone knew existed.

The chances of the books being opened would be particularly slim if the bank(s) end up being owned by the Federal Reserve. I know that politicians are currently making noise about publicly auditing the Fed, but that's all it will end up being...noise to placate the proles. Unless politicians suddenly start finding themselves losing elections en masse and/or finding themselves at the working end of pitchforks & shotguns.

We've injected capital into at least a dozen major banks through the TARP program. And, although these institutions have claimed that their capital margins were damaged by 'bad paper' and they were unable to make loans, they have refused to open their books to regulators (the Fed doesn't count as a regulator. It is owned by its member banks) to show them the magnitude and type of this bad paper.

The banks' portfolio of mortgage CDOs were (supposedly) insured by AIG's CDS's. When AIG appeared to be illiquid, one proposal was to have the gov't issue banks its own guarantees to replace the (useless) AIG policies. Possibly by swapping bundles of CDOs along with their covering CDSs for Treasury notes. But the banks refused to divulge what sort of CDS paper they had on their books. So, the government was forced to prop up AIG. Problem: About 80% of AIGs CDS policies were sold to speculators. That is; people who had no insurable interest in any mortgage paper, but were just buying said paper as a gamble*. So we were forced to bail out 4 speculators for every one bank we rescued.

*It wasn't that many years ago that such speculation (buying insurance policies against people or property for which one has no insurable interest) was racketeering and would earn said 'investors' a quick trip to a federal penitentiary. This was one racket that the mob engaged in. Until Congress made it legal.

Not loans. Equity positions in the banks. As such, I'd expect that the largest shareholder in any company shouldn't have any problem going to the execs and asking for a full accounting of what they are up to. Or be shown the door very quickly.

The fact that we "don't care" is a testament to how thoroughly we have been turned into sheep by special interest groups. At least the people in Iceland are being made aware that something foul is afoot.

Per the cease and desist order [wikileaks.org], it appears that the lawyers on behalf of Kraupthing are doing their job.

The laws themselves appear to be there to protect the client's confidential information. Paraphrasing (IANAL, IANAL, IANAL!) they are:

58. Banks are not suppose to disclose their customer's financial information.59. Exception #1 - if there is a risk to a parent company60. Exception #2 - if the customer(s) say it is okay to disclose the information.

So basically the bank and the bank lawyers are doing the job they are legally obligated to do on behalf of their customers.

And what if the clients' actions were illegal. How do you weight up the right to privacy against the public interest (a basic question in British constitutional law, or so I've heard)? You speak as if everything was in black and white. Just because there is a privacy angle to this does not mean you win the argument.

You accuse others of hypocrisy, but yet you fail to realize your own arrogance.

Of course they are trying to censorship this. They have been hard at work since the bank crash trying to hide all the stuff that can show the illigal stuff they where doing. And this was not the only bank of the 3 that went down that had very questionable (amounts over what was legal) loans to insiders.

The difference impacts the rendering of the document beginning on page 16. It appears to have HTTP headers inserted into the file. The same difference is seen across these download programs: firefox, lynx, wget. There may be a bad replication to that site. Maybe they used a bad HTTP client.

I'm an American so this rule doesn't apply (national security is a euphemism for "because I said so, that's why; questioning the HSA is Counterfreedomary!")...but given the history of the sort of people who censor WikiLeaks I have to question whether or not I trust anyone who does.

But wait, there's more! According to my favorite Icelandic blogger [icelandweatherreport.com], the commissioner who issued the injunction has a son who is or was a spokesman for the bank, and another who was an executive and the recipient of one of the no-payments loans.

Iceland is a close-knit society. The anger there is fueled by a sense of betrayal that people from big heterogeneous countries can't fully appreciate.

Americans are just conditioned to be politically angry: they're like trained monkeys, throw-in 'corporation' and they become a ravenous mob--probably too glib to realize that any non-individual entity recognized by the government is basically a corporation: corporations are not evil, they can be evil, or they can be otherwise: but nuspeak has conditioned so many to associate them with being so. AIG was living-up to legal obligations: they could have done that, or gotten sued and payed even more: and it was

From any practical standpoint, you're quite wrong. I just spent a couple of hours going through the massive FOIA disclosure [csmonitor.com] of the Air Force's internal emails dealing with the aftermath of the Air Force One flyby of the Statue of Liberty back in April. Much of the 553-page document is concerned with detailed observations of bloggers' reactions, even to the point of discussing the rate of change in "tweets per minute" criticizing the White House and USAF.

The US government, at least, takes amateur online journalism very seriously. It's safe to say other governments do as well.

Like Monica Lewinsky, Dan Rather's Memogate, the doctored Reuters pictures of bombings in Lebanon, the firing of U.S. prosecutors, "Macaca", etc. etc.

Face it, the relationship between bloggers and the mainstream media is not parasitic anymore, it's symbiotic.

It's true, most blogs (including my twitter feed) contain only marginally useful information, if at all. But so do most newspaper articles or TV shows, that merely recite the stuff fed to them by corporations and governments.

I don't know from Iceland, but presumably the bank does not actually employ a military or police force capable of censoring broadcasts? So the governement is the one doing the censorship, because the bank asked nicely? It would be kinda cool if I'm wrong here...

In this context, it is important to distinguish between the "State" and the "Government." If you were arrested for drunk driving by an ordinary policeman, you would hardly say that the Government was arresting you.

"Censorship is when a government stops a person or organization from disseminating information"

The Mafia, among other organizations, would thank you for this definition. Executing an entire family, or even an entire village, to prevent the dissemination of sensitive information wouldn't be considered "censorship", unless the government assisted in the executions. Thank you, sir.